Introduction 15 a century ago, Ignaz Goldziher appended a brief, anecdotal summary of the topic to his Muslim Studies.1' Since then, there have been a handful of articles and chapter-length contributions such as those of Jonathan Berkey and Omaima Abou-Bakr on women in the Mamluk period (thirteenth to sixteenth centuries), and that of Richard Bulliet on Iranian elite women in the pre-Mongol period (eleventh and twelfth centuries).'1’ More recently, Muhammad Akram Nadwi has authored a detailed overview of female hadith transmission as an introduction to his forthcoming Arabic biographical dictionary of female hadith scholars. '1 While Nadwi collates valuable information about the range of women’s participation, he does not aim to provide historical synthesis and analysis.32 Similarly, a number of Arabic biographical dictionaries and monographs relevant to this topic offer a wealth of intriguing anecdotes but do not advance broader historical or conceptual conclusions. 1 My book is thus the first detailed investigation of female hadith transmission that employs a rigorous historical 29 Goldziher, Muslim Studies , 2:366-68. 30 Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 161-81; Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Teaching the Words of the Prophet: Women Instructors of the Hadith (Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries),” Hawwa 1, no. 3 (2003): 306-28; Richard Bulliet, “Women and the Urban Religious Elite in the Pre-Mongol Period,” in Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800 , ed. Guity Nashat and Lois Beck, 68-79 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Mohammad Akram Nadwi, al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam (London: Interface, 2007), xi. Nadwi’s Arabic biographical compendium (forthcoming), numbering fifty-seven volumes, brings together numerous references to female hadith transmitters from the rise of Islam to the present. His efforts in this regard were highlighted by Carla Powers in her article “A Secret History,” New York Times, February 25, 2007, bringing the research into the mainstream. Nadwi characterizes his contribution as follows: “That material is, though arranged and organized, a listing ; it is, by analogy with a word dictionary, much nearer to ‘words’ than ‘sentences’, and far from ‘paragraphs’ linked into an ‘essay’.” al-Muhaddithat , xi. 33 Arabic works devoted specifically to women and religious learning in classical Islam include: ‘ Abd al-‘ Aziz Sayyid al-Ahl, Tabaqat al-Nisa ’ al-Muhaddithat: Min al-Tabaqa al-Ula ila al-Tabaqa al-Sadisa (Cairo: n.p., 1981); Salih Ma‘tuq, Jubud al-Mar’a fi Riwayat al-Hadith: al-Qarn al-Thamin al-Hijri (Beirut: Dar al-Basha’ir al-Islamiyya, 1997); Mashhur Salman, ‘Inayat al-Nisa’ bi’l-Hadith al-Nabawi, Safahat Mudi’a min Hayat al-Muhaddithat hatta al-Qarn al-Thalith ‘Ashar al-Hijri (Beirut: Dar Ibn Hazm, 1994). Also, mention should be made here of Najiya Ibrahim’s study of Shuhda al-Katiba, a sixth/twelfth-century scholar. The monograph is unusual in that it synthesizes anecdotal information into a cohesive biographical study (see Musnidat al-‘Iraq: Shuhda al-Katiba [Amman: Mu’assasat al-Balsam, 1996]). There are also two examples of published compilations of hadith narrated by women: Shuhda al-Katiba, al- ‘Umda min al-Fawa ’id wa 7Athar al-Sihah wa’l-Ghara’ib fi Mashyakhat Shuhda (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanjl, 1994) and Juz’ Biba bint Abd al-Samad al-Harthamiyya (d. 477/1084) (Kuwait: Maktabat alKhulafa’, 198-). The biographical dictionary by ‘Umar Rida Kahhala, A'lam al-Nisa’, 5 vols. (Damascus: al-Matba‘a al-Hashimiyya bi-Dimashq, 1959) is not solely devoted to